Social Good

A Hackathon for Happiness

What if there were a concrete way to measure happiness and well-being, then use those metrics to change the world?

The H(app)athon Project, an initiative to create digital tools to drive global contentment, aims to find specific ways to use your happiness data, and it wants programmers to help.

"Hacking happiness" is the project's primary goal — using technology to provide the most accurate picture of worldwide well-being possible. Happiness indicators include life satisfaction, health, community and civic engagement.

"Happiness indicators or indexes like the Gross National Happiness Index from Bhutan, reflect a fuller picture of value for a country beyond the GDP [gross domestic product]," John Havens, founder of the H(app)athon Project, told Mashable. "We want groups like Quantified Self to be a part of our metrics so we can give big data a direction."

Havens has analyzed the rise of three trends: Quantified Self, the acquisition of data from a person's daily actions and behavior; the Internet of Things, devices that can transform daily life; and Bhutan's Gross National Happiness Index, which measures quality of life.

"Tools to measure our actions have matured to the point where we can essentially analyze the heartbeat of the planet," Havens said. "But we don't have a common cultural or ethical framework around these technologies, and I see things getting pretty messy and scary if we don't agree on a way to look at things."

Havens put together a detailed description of how the H(app)athon Project could create this framework. Then he gathered a committee of approximately 30 experts from various places, including the United Nations, World Economic Forum, MIT, Cambridge University, Microsoft and PEW Internet, to guide the project from there.

The project revolves around H(app)athon events — essentially hackathons — that will take place in New York City and London on March 20, 2013 (which coincides with the U.N.'s World Happiness Day).

But you don't have to be in New York or London to participate in the H(app)athon. In fact, the pivotal part of the project is its open-source environment, through which people around the world will be crowdsourced for their ideas. Havens explained that the committee is hard at work finishing up the Mobile Happiness Indicator Survey, for which you can sign up on the website.

"We'll send questions via phone (smartphone and feature phone) over the course of two weeks to get a sense of how people view their well-being in the digital age," he said. "We'd love a lot of participation, because we feel that rather than picking an existing happiness indicator, it's essential to crowdsource people's thoughts around these metrics in an open-source environment.

"We'll take results of this opt-in survey as a data set for our first hackathon ... All results will be posted in a creative commons environment and people's anonymized data will be used to better understand the digital app or methodology we're building over the following year."

The other aspect of the open-source environment is that people can host their own H(app)athon events in their own cities. Havens and the committee have created a toolkit (which can be downloaded from the website) that provides a simple event format with instructions on how to contribute ideas and post them to the H(app)athon Wiki.

In Fall 2013, a conference in New York City will present all of the findings from each hackathon.

Jon Hall, policy specialist with the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and H(app)athon committee member, told Mashable that gross domestic product was never meant to be a measure of how well anyone is doing — it's really just a measure of how much money is changing hands in the economy.

"We need to get much better measures of the things we value, because it's only when we start measuring things that we give it attention," Hall said. "That's [how] we are, as human beings. When we start measuring something, then we start focusing on it."

Hall, who has been working on developing better measures of well-being and progress for the past 13 years, said that a science of happiness has really blossomed within the past 20 years or so. We now know that happy people live longer, have better relationships and are more productive at work. Now we need to get the word out.

"People like me are working to influence national governments, but influence really starts with individuals," Hall says.

For the tech side of things, people like John Clippinger, a research scientist with MIT's Human Dynamics Lab, joined the committee. Clippinger believes that when people start to get better data about themselves and their environments, measuring things affects how they behave, and they start to form new values and new ways of evaluating things.

"It becomes a new sort of social metric," Clippinger told Mashable. "We [at MIT's Media Lab] do a lot of work [with] being able to use the phone as a sensor to datamine all your interactions, which becomes a pretty good signature of who you are and how you interact with people.

"And if it becomes a measure of something that affects your behavior one way or another, that's quite important. Out of that, you have all new kinds of values."

Between experts like Hall and Clippinger, who come from different professional backgrounds, and the others on the committee, the H(app)athon Project seems to have a diverse and knowledgable advisory system in place.

While it's still early in the game, Havens believes the ideal outcome for the H(app)athon is to create an app or methodology where anybody can easily identify areas of their life that lack balance, and to find resources for improvement or help.

Ultimately, this could move from individuals to governments, and could really drive informed policy change. "2013 is the year in which people will fully understand how their lives are viewed as data, and we want to help them leverage modern technology to be happy [in] the way [that] they choose, while helping others at the same time," Havens said.

Mashable
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